Welcome to the introduction of our 7 part series written by John Palacio Sr. about the sources of our modern day acting techniques. The people, principles and practices that shape today’s actor. For the modern actor, little can hide from cameras and microphones. TV and film technology bring audiences within a hair’s breadth of the actor and the action. Every nuance, the smallest expression, the slightest inflection, is conveyed to the audience. As a result, today’s acting professional must master dozens of skills. In order to deliver thoroughly believable performances, today’s actors must communicate emotions that are consistent with the characters they portray. In this series, we touch on some of the people who brought us the acting techniques we use today.

Some of the inventions that changed theatre. Thomas Alva Edison, Georges Méliès, Herman Casler, D.W. Griffith, A brief remembrance of several leaders in the field, particularly the teachings of Konstantine Stanislavski.

The period between the invention of motion pictures and the advent of Talkies at the end of the 1920’s is known as the Silent Era. Carl Laemmle, Jesse Lasky, Cecil B. DeMille, Louis B. Mayer, Richard Rowland, Marcus Loew, Samuel Goldwyn, .William Selig, William Fox, the stars and comedians of the silent era, playwright Bertoit Brecht, French avant-garde theorist Antonin Artaud, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and, of course, Michael Chekhov.

Molders of the Modern American Actor – Part 5Evolution of acting techniques from the advent of the talkies into the 1950’s.
Your Host: Kim Estes
Like Chekhov, Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya were Stanislavski alumnus. Their greatest theatrical achievement was the establishment of The American Laboratory Theatre in New York. The Lab emphasized three aspects of actor training. Among the approximately 500 members trained at the Lab, two individuals would profoundly affect the future direction of acting, writing and drama teaching in America. Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler.

Today’s stories are more complex; their characters, more complicated. They have to be. We’re more complex and more complicated. Actors — from earliest theater up to modern times – have changed who we are, how we think and what we feel.

Molders of the Modern American Actor is a Pepper Jay Production, directed by John Michael Ferrari, written by John Palacio Sr for the Actors Reporter, a channel of the Actors Podcast Network, a Pepper Jay Production.